Poor mandarins

So I was in my LFS the other day to pick up an emarald crab and noticed they had a new shipment in that contained two mandarins, they were beautiful. The first one I saw was in I'm guessing a 29 or 36 gal, somewhere around there. It was about an inch long and I could easily tell that it was starving. I pointed it out to one of the clerks and she said she would throw some more food in, now I'm thinking they have mandarins eating prepared food. Excited I asked and she meant she was going to put in some more of those arctic pods that come in a bottle. Now I'm no mandarin expert but I know you can't keep them by just feeding them out of the bottle like that. Now for the real kicker, I walk down farther and to my horror they're keeping a mandarin in an 8gal biocube . It had just as bad of a shrunken belly as the other one. I felt really bad for the fish and wanted to get one just because I know they could've at least gotten a decent meal in my tank but my 29 wouldn't have been much better. Poor fish.

 

irrisponsible to say the least my mandarin is my favourite even though i only see him about 30 seconds a week if you add a fuge to your tank you can keep them

 

i have just created a rubble pile which seems to work hes pretty healthy looking

 

please go back to the store and smack the employees

 

Smack them real HARD.

 

You can too keep a Mandarin alive and very healthy by feeding them pods from a bottle, but not Arctic Pods, they have to be alive and that is one expensive proposition at up to 20 a bottle!

And all going to that shop an smacking them is going to do is get you put in jail and next week they will have 2 more Mandarins to kill. You gotta do it diplomatically, go home, print out a Mandarin info and care sheet with pictures and take it to them.

I actually did that more that once and a few weeks later the owner started to ask me what fish he should order and how to take care of them. Some of them have no clue how to maintain salt water fish and if the you approach it that way they get interested in doing it the right way becasue a dead fish does nothing but cost them money.